According to court documents, Rupert Murdoch admitted that Fox News personalities like Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, Sean Hannity and Maria Bartiromo endorsed the false allegation of a stolen election. Additionally Murdoch allowed Jared Kushner to view confidential Fox information regarding ads placed by the Biden campaign, before these aired publicly!
Just imagine if this was Twitter, showing Trump's ads to Biden. Republicans would be calling for Twitter to be shut down.
This is collusion of the biggest mainstream news organization with the Trump campaign, to help him win an election by dishonest means, and Republicans don't care.
Newly released court documents reveal that Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire owner of Fox News, acknowledged under oath that several Fox News hosts endorsed Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
The mogul made the admission during a deposition in the $1.6bn defamation lawsuit brought against the network by the voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems, which has accused Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, of maligning its reputation. In his deposition, Murdoch said that the hosts Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro “endorsed” the false narrative promoted by Trump.
Even Murdoch himself dismissed Trump’s claims, describing the former president’s obsession with proving the election was stolen as “terrible stuff damaging everybody”.
Murdoch acknowledged in his deposition that he could have ordered the network not to platform Trump lawyers such as Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani on its programs: “I could have. But I didn’t,” he said.
Dominion’s defamation case is being described as a “landmark”. A Harvard law professor recently told the Guardian he had “never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues”.
Fox News has argued that the comments are protected under the constitutional right to free speech, and that it was only reporting on Mr Trump's allegations, not supporting them.
In a statement provided to BBC News on Monday, Fox said Dominion's lawsuit "mischaracterizes the facts by cherry-picking soundbites, omitting key context, and mischaracterizing the record".
In order to prove defamation, lawyers for Dominion would have to successfully argue that Fox presented false information, and did so knowing that it was untrue.
A jury trial is expected to begin in Delaware in April.
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